[Themaintainers] [EXTERNAL] Re: XKCD comic on maintenance

[Jordan Hale]

Hi folks,

For those who aren't also subscribed to the Information Maintainers list, please note our monthly community call coming up this Friday on exactly this topic - doing our best to make sure our lives don't hinge on a single person in Nebraska!


This month our guest speaker will be Ross Spencer, who will be joining us to discuss working within and maintaining decentralized, small-group systems and development infrastructures in different organizational and national contexts. Ross has a ten year background in digital preservation, and an off, and now on-again relationship with professional software development. Having spent the last decade putting together bespoke tooling (all open source) for Archives New Zealand, and The National Archives, UK, in pursuit of looking after the archival record. Ross now works for Artefactual Systems Inc. applying some of the knowledge gained in that time to the open source Archivematica system and the various Artefactual clients. Ross now resides in Canada and has a keen interest in staying indoors (but is looking forward to being able to go out again soon along with everybody else). You can find out more about Ross' work via the various links on his blog http://exponentialdecay.co.uk/blog

August 21st at 8am PST / 9am MST / 10am CST / 11am EST / 3pm GMT
Description:https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81790200032<https://www.google.com/url?q=https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81790200032&sa=D&source=calendar&usd=2&usg=AOvVaw1Xo3DYCcBKboYWFdxMc0_n> Meeting ID: 817 9020 0032 One tap mobile +13462487799,,81790200032# US (Houston) +12532158782,,81790200032# US (Tacoma) Dial by your location +1 346 248 7799 US (Houston) +1 253 215 8782 US (Tacoma) +1 669 900 9128 US (San Jose) +1 312 626 6799 US (Chicago) +1 646 558 8656 US (New York) +1 301 715 8592 US (Germantown) Meeting ID: 817 9020 0032 Find your local number: https://us02web.zoom.us/u/kbpYZXJhKu

My best,
Jordan
Information Maintainers Community Co-Facilitator
---
Jordan Hale (they/them/theirs)
Digital Repositories Librarian, University of Waterloo
jordan.hale at uwaterloo.ca<mailto:jordan.hale at uwaterloo.ca>
519 888 4567 x40135





On Aug 19, 2020, at 10:37 AM, Edward Summers <ehs at POBOX.COM<mailto:ehs at POBOX.COM>> wrote:


On Aug 18, 2020, at 9:59 PM, Sims, Benjamin Hayden <bsims at lanl.gov<mailto:bsims at lanl.gov>> wrote:
Related to Andy's point, not a lot of modern infrastructures have embraced layers of abstraction as enthusiastically as computing has. The idea behind layers of abstraction is to hide complexity behind simpler interfaces, which makes it possible to think of software as a "stack" of components (and consequently as a Jenga-like construct as depicted in the cartoon). So part of me wants to say that weird dependencies might be better hidden, and hence more surprising, in software. But on the other hand there are plenty of examples of hidden dependencies in old-school infrastructure. I'm not sure they follow the same stack-like structure though, so the cartoon might look a little different. I'm curious if any of the software developers/maintainers on the list have some perspective on this.

Actually, in some ways I think dependencies are *more* legible in software than they usually are in "old-school" infrastructures. From makefiles to pom.xml to package.json, software builds need to explicitly list these dependencies, and the dependencies tend to be actionable. I feel like these lists are largely understudied from an infrastructure perspective--but I'd love to be corrected if people know of some research.

Also, i'd be interested to hear if people have found there to be "real world" or non-computational equivalents to these dependency lists for the research, for example accounting ledgers, supply chain data, etc?

//Ed
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